Advertising: The Tupperware Party Moves to Social Media

Next week, the Tupperware Brands Corporation plans to significantly increase its presence in social media like Facebook and Twitter, which more consumers are using as ways to connect with marketers as well as one another.

The goal is to find “more disruptive methods” to dispel perceptions that “we are your mother’s Tupperware,” said Rick Goings, chairman and chief executive of Tupperware Brands in Orlando, Fla., as the company seeks more consumers to buy — and sell — its products like containers, cutlery and cookware.

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A Facebook page devoted to a Tupperware campaign that carries the theme “Chain of confidence” will get more rich content like video clips featuring women of achievement who will be presented as “confidence counselors.” The page will also offer blog posts, articles, motivational tips and inspirational quotations.

Tupperware is to join the ranks of marketers seeking to encourage Facebook users to say they “like” corporate pages by enlisting the singer Kelly Clarkson to lead an initiative that will promise a donation of a dollar to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America for each new “like” clicked for the revamped Facebook page.

And Tupperware will add an account on Twitter devoted to the confidence campaign, supplementing others used by the company’s United States sales force, marketing arm and corporate public relations department. Comments on Twitter related to the campaign are all to be identified with an “official” hash tag, #Confidence.

“It’s time to take it up to the next level,” Mr. Goings said of the company’s social media efforts.

Tupperware Brands has long believed in the power of social networking, he added, because recommendations about a brand or product “from someone you have confidence in is the absolutely best form” of marketing.

Underlining that, Tupperware Brands runs no traditional advertising, preferring to spend its marketing dollars on public relations, events, celebrity endorsers and promotions.

For instance, the chef Michael White took part in March in a two-day “pop-up” restaurant dubbed the Tupper Club. And Ms. Clarkson is to perform later this month at a concert, called Confide and Conquer, that will be sponsored by Tupperware in New York.

For a marketer like Tupperware Brands that specializes in direct selling, “the only thing advertising does is it makes your sales force feel supported,” Mr. Goings said, but that can also be accomplished “when you offer them incentives and trips.”

Elinor Steele, vice president for global communications and public relations at Tupperware Brands, characterized the company’s current status in social media this way: “We’ve kind of stuck our toe in the water, dabbling in Facebook and Twitter in a small way.”

“Now, we’re getting serious about it,” Ms. Steele said, “employing some more sophisticated programs and social media strategies” that are meant to create “an interactive community and destination” for people who sell Tupperware, buy Tupperware or want to become part of the sales force. “It’s about moving from brand awareness to helping people become brand advocates,” she added.

Most mainstream marketers are using social media to augment conventional kinds of advertising rather than replacing them. Either way, Web sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are becoming selling channels alongside legacy media like television and newspapers.

Social media “allow people to have a say in a brand,” said Peter Nicholson, creative officer at JWT New York, part of the JWT unit of WPP, and “the power of consumers engaging with a brand with real-time connections” can make a big difference.

The agency of record for Tupperware Brands is Maloney & Fox in New York, a division of Waggener Edstrom that is handling social media, events and even merchandise like a line of Confidence apparel, including T-shirts and scarves, that is to be sold on the Chain of Confidence Facebook page.

Using social media can help marketers “reach out to a younger demographic in a more interesting and dynamic way,” said Julie Levinthal, who is the program lead for this Tupperware Brands initiative at Maloney & Fox. That is important as Tupperware introduces itself to women who may not have ever attended a Tupperware party or burped one of its signature containers.

“We’re calling it the ‘cool-ification’ of the brand,” Ms. Levinthal said, intended to counter the image that Tupperware is “this June Cleaver, 1950s brand, which it’s not.”

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Will Wheeler, the social media lead at Maloney & Fox, said the endorsers who will appear on Facebook and Twitter for Tupperware were selected because of their influence in social media.

The initial so-called confidence counselors taking part in the campaign are Beverly Bond, a D.J. who founded an organization named Black Girls Rock, and Abby Zeichner, a designer who specializes in plus-size clothing.

Their videos that are to be on the revamped Facebook page do not take hard-sell tacks. In one clip, Ms. Zeichner uses the phrase “Tupperware parties” in passing. In another clip, Ms. Bond does not mention Tupperware at all.

“Beverly’s mom has some Tupperware,” Ms. Levinthal said, but Ms. Bond did not until she received cookware from Tupperware Brands.

“Beverly didn’t know when we sent her the thousand-dollar Chef Series that Tupperware makes these stainless steel pots and pans,” Ms. Levinthal said.

Changing brand perceptions, one pot (or pan) at a time.